Internet Companies

Twitter has been down for the past few hours, the result of a denial of service attack, according to an article on CNET. Although this must be frustrating to avid Twitter users and Twitter employees, this outage could end up being a very good thing for the company.

I haven’t dug in to my Google Analytics account this morning, but I would bet my traffic is down (on my blog and on my geodomain names). Generally after I post an article on my blog, I post an update on Twitter to let my followers know that there’s a new article. Within a few minutes, people begin to post comments, and I can tell that many of them saw the link via Twitter and visited my blog as a result. This hasn’t happened yet.

Needless to say, with a Twitter outage, I am sure that a lot of websites are seeing a significant impact to their traffic. Some sites may even see a loss of revenue as a result of the Twitter outage. All of this will make companies realize how important Twitter is to their bottom line, and may shed some light on ways to generate revenue for the yet to be profitable venture.

Jumpkicks, Inc. is a development-stage company whose stock is traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board Market. The company is an online martial arts retailer that sells products, such as uniforms, shirts, equipment, mats, and other products related to martial arts. They also provide information of interest to martial artists and instructors. The company operates exclusively online.

Until May of 2008, the company operated online on Jumpkicks.com, however, something happened in May that caused the company to lose their primary domain name. A Whois search from April 15 revealed that the domain name wasn’t set to expire until March of 2009, so a forgotten renewal seems to be out of the question.

To remediate the situation, the company purchased other domain names and uploaded their website on to these new domain names: Jumpkicks.net, Jumpkicks.org, Jumpkicks.us, and Jumpkicks.info. The company is also pursuing other options to get their primary .com domain name back.

Unfortunately for Jumpkicks, they are now realizing just how important the .com domain name is to their company’s operations. Because of the situation, the publicly traded company was forced to note this in their a 10K/A filed today.

“Unfortunately, the domain name www.jumpkicks.com lent significant value to our company. The long history of the Site drew regular repeat traffic. We are now attempting to draw traffic to the new domain names, but we have thus far been unable to do so successfully. If we are not able to generate significant traffic, we will not be able to generate significant revenue to support our operations.”

This goes to show how important an established domain name is to a company and why many small companies with high value domain names are reluctant to sell their domain name and move it to a lesser known domain name.